Quote:
In just four months, Kapten has accrued 16,000 drivers compared to Uber’s 40,000
For an app that's effectively claiming to dwarf Uber's growth rate in London I haven't heard much about it (although to be fair haven't been paying too much attention to the London app market).
However, found this, which was also featured on TaxiPoint a few months ago:
Uber rival Kapten is editing drivers’ photos to make them wear suitshttps://www.wired.co.uk/article/kapten- ... ver-photosBefore a recent rebrand, drivers for ride-hailing app Kapten were encouraged to wear a uniform. Now the company is just editing their photos to make it look like they’re wearing oneRide-hailing app Kapten changed its whole image before its launch in London, but vestiges of its former life still appear when you match with a driver.
Until February, the app was known as Chauffeur Privé, and its drivers were encouraged to wear a uniform of a suit with a compulsory red tie, matching the silhouetted figure in the company logo. The French firm – which is backed by BMW and Daimler – rebranded to Kapten as part of expansion plans, with a new logo and advertising that seems to be aimed at a younger audience.
Drivers are no longer asked to wear a tie, but the company is now editing their in-app profile pictures to make it look like they’re dressed in a suit, even if they’re wearing something more casual in the original photograph.
A spokesperson for Kapten says the pictures are “processed by an in-house software” which takes the driver’s face and adds it to a “standardised bust wearing a blue suit,” adjusts the framing and applies standard filters for brightness and background. They stress that the faces themselves are never modified or edited.
The company says the process – which has been going on since before the rebrand – is designed to standardise more than 20,000 different driver photos that it receives each year, each one with different brightness levels, background, framing and view point. “The objective is to standardise a large set of pictures, which are de facto without any common features, and give passengers an easily identifiable picture of their driver,” it says.
The editing is applied to every driver photo that gets uploaded onto the app, and the Kapten spokesperson said that drivers were fully aware of the process. However, users on Uber People, an online forum for ride-hailing drivers, expressed surprise that their pictures had been changed. “Log onto the app to see that kapten have photo edited my profile picture so that I have a black blazer over a white shirt!” wrote one in a thread called ‘Lol kapten’. “I look smart,” said another.
Kapten, which began as an attempt to create a homegrown ride-hailing company in Paris, is aggressively taking on Uber in London, with posters on tubes and trains, and a billboard campaign that hammers its larger rival for its tax dealings. “Others avoid paying VAT in the UK, that’s not uber cool,” reads one advert. It’s one of a number of apps looking to take on Uber by undercutting it on prices for riders, and by offering drivers more commissions and bonuses.
Newcomers include Bolt, an Estonian company that recently relaunched in the capital, and miwhip, which promises every 100th passenger a ride in a gold-wrapped supercar and has been running promotional events across the city (although the launch has been delayed, and the app doesn’t appear to be available for download in the UK at the moment).
Wheely, a London-based firm with Russian roots, aims to tap into the higher end of the market that Kapten has moved away from – the drivers of its fleet of luxury vehicles wear actual suits and ties and get out of the car to open the door for passengers.
In the release notes on the App Store after it rebranded, Kapten promised that its new look would not mean any change in the quality of service. “Before you freak out and create a petition to defend the red tie, let us tell you this: everything changed but nothing actually changed,” it wrote. Perhaps Kapten’s efforts to keep its drivers looking smart reflects a desire to maintain that high-end feel as it rolls out a mass market new look designed to take on Uber and win.
Updated July 2, 2019 14:30BST: This article has been amended to clarify that Wheely's head office is located in the UK. Kapten's uniform for drivers was encouraged, but not mandatory